Let's get physical

House music has always been the UK club scene’s soundtrack of choice, but you could count the number of innovative British house producers that have emerged in recent years on one hand.

Unfortunately, the sublime UK deep house of the ‘90s gave way to tribal and then the nauseatingly dull electro house varieties, leaving little room for innovation. The situation is slowly changing in the UK, however, with Radioslave, Switch and the notoriously fickle yet adventurous Crosstown Rebels leading the charge.
28-year-old Jesse Rose also belongs to that small coterie of UK house producers who've flown in the face of the mediocre consensus. Along with Trevor Loveys and Switch, Rose has inadvertently started his own sub-genre, fidget house, a stop-start, cut-up sound, characterised by angular rhythms, R&B and hip-hop samples and a refreshingly lo-fi aesthetic.
“Using hip-hop samples is part of a general attitude,” Jesse says. “If you listen to house music when you’re making house music, that’s when things go wrong! I started off by collaborating with Trevor, but nowadays he does jazzier stuff and Switch has reached the crossover audience. I’d say my style is more electronic.” Rose’s releases on Made To Play, Front Room and Dubsided are as quintessentially urban English as grime, but just as his 14-year involvement with UK house music has begun to pay off (Rose began playing records in his early teens, but jokes that he was a late developer compared to US DJs who've literally started in kindergarten) he’s left London.
“I needed a change," Rose explains. "I'd been living there for 10 years and it’s a hardcore place at the best of times. There’s only so many clubs and after parties you can do, and about a month or two ago my girlfriend got punched in the face by a crackhead who stole her mobile phone. That was the final straw. I’d played in Berlin quite a lot over the past six or seven years, I’d already made good friends there, so moving wasn’t a problem.”
The German capital currently has a higher proportion of dance producers than any other world city, but Jesse has shunned Berlin’s three-day party scene and finds little in common with minimal house/techno, the sound that's played in practically every Berlin club.
“I’m lucky because apart from Dixon and Ewan Pearson, I’m one of the few house DJ’s that plays regularly here, and I have a monthly residency at the Panorama Bar. I don’t want to get too involved in the minimal sound – that’s pretty much all you hear in Berlin, and because people only hear minimal all the time, they go crazy when they hear house music.”
Rose isn’t living in splendid isolation, though. He made the connection with Get Physical label owners M.A.N.D.Y. last year at the WMC – “I came on at 7am when everyone was in flying form, but I’d like to think that my set impressed them”. Having remixed Heidi’s ‘Vejer’ for the label, Rose was made an offer he couldn’t refuse – the opportunity to segue the third installment of Get Physical’s Body Language mix series. Seeing as M.A.N.D.Y. and DJ T, one of the other label’s owners, were responsible for the first two mixes, the decision to hand over the third to a relative stranger means that Get Physical clearly have great confidence in Rose’s talents.
“Get Physical is always looking for fresh ideas, but I was honoured that they asked me," he beams. "They let me do what I wanted, so the mix isn’t their typical sound. Having said that, because I was under pressure to get it just right, it took me three weeks and countless botched attempts before I was happy with it!”
Mixed on two turntables and a CD deck – “It would've been easier to do on a computer, but DJ-ing should be involved, a performance" – it features loads of Jesse and his UK contemporaries’ chopped-up off-beat grooves, complemented by acidic, wobbly basslines and hip-hop vocal samples. Thankfully, Body Language 3 doesn’t stay in one place for too long. There’s a concession to minimal in the shape of Tigerskin’s ‘101 On The Run’, Paul Woolford’s huge ‘Erotic Discourse’ track makes an appearance, and Rose ends the mix with Aril Brikha’s deep techno classic ‘Groove La Chord’.
“I tried to include all aspects of what I play, from the dubby stuff to the whacked-out material and then into some Detroit techno,” Rose explains. “I like to get a groove going and have some variety so it’s not just a bass drum and a snare banging away.”